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Talk:Carbines/@comment-212.109.29.195-20121128061815/@comment-82.131.84.40-20130116222803
I agree that the fictive weapons physics is a bit shady in this game, especially with VS weapons. The plasma balls allegedly have very small mass (almost no bullet drop) and low kinetic energy (they seem to be travelling quite slowly) - so where is the recoil coming from? Some sort of explosion from air heating at the muzzle? Haven't really played the other empires, but their weapons seem to be a bit more consistent with their supposed backgrounds. I mean, NC seems to use some sort of electromagnetic mass drivers (gauss guns), which accelerate a small, light projectile to immense speeds for a very high kinetic energy, so their guns should have high damage, high accuracy, no projectile drop over any practical range, slow firing rate (takes time to charge those coils) and hell of a lot of kick from Newton's Third Law - which is about the way they are in the game. Although, as slight criticism, gauss guns with high fire rate should have significantly lower damage, turning them more into weapons designed to suppress, rather than kill the enemy. TR weapons seem to be very much like the 'spray and pray' small arms of today, with low-caliber (possibly caseless) ammunition with all its pros and cons - medium lethality, fairly controllable recoil, high bullet drop and spread because the rounds are small, heavy and a lot slower than the NC ones, so the weapons have a much higher firing rate to offset those disadvantages. Heavier weapon/slower rate of fire would mean less bullet spread and small TR guns like carbines and pistols should also have their range strongly affected by bullet drop-off. More accurate and high-range rifles would be forced to use a higher caliber round and consequently suffer from much more kickback. Again, very much like it is in the game, I guess. The VS energy weapons, however, seem to be causing damage by the innate energy of the 'plasma balls' rather than their velocity (kinetic energy), so they should have practically no recoil whatsoever, and provided that the 'plasma' is not affected by gravity or the magnetic field of Auraxis (which seems to be the case, since the balls of energy do not usually appear to drop or deviate), the weapons should be pinpoint accurate at any range, both for the first shot and all the consecutive ones. After all, absence of recoil and high accuracy are the very reasons why energy weapons would be used in the first place - besides the ability to use standardized 'power cores' across a variety of weapons to reduce logistical problems with ammo. The only logical downsides to energy weapons are the dissipation of energy in the surrounding atmosphere (which means decreased damage over higher distances, especially in the case of thin, superheated plasma balls) and overheating. While the energy loss seems to be there within the game (I wonder how the sniper rifles get around that - better plasma confinement, perhaps?), the heat problems only present themselves on engineer turrets. I actually think it would be more interesting if they'd replace recoil with heating issues on VS weapons. Not that they would actually have to oveheat, more like you would have a carbine that is absolutely recoil-free, but can only fire quickly in three to five shot bursts and has a much slower firing rate in full auto. That would fit much better with the overall Vanu image of cool-headed, methodical battlefield surgeons. Sorry for the long post... got carried away.